Libraries are continuously looking for ways to improve and provide innovative services for patrons in today’s fast-paced information world. On this edition of Library Leadership Podcast, we talk with Kris Johnson, Head of the Learning and Research Services Department at Montana State University Library. She shares with us a process that her library uses called Design Thinking, which implements highly creative methods to provide responsive services.

Design Thinking translates ideas into blueprints for human-centered improvements by seeing things through their eyes. Kris points us toward tools that make Design Thinking something that anyone can do utilizing step-by-step resources. Want to really know what someone thinks about your library? Ask them to write you a love letter – or a break-up letter. Kris and her team did just that in a process called, “Hey, MSU Library…We Need to Talk.”

Full Transcript

Want to really know what someone thinks about your library?
Ask them to write you a love letter or a breakup letter. Kris and her team from
Montana State University Library did just that through a process called design
thinking.

Sure, thanks for having me Adrian. I was actually born and
raised in Montana and I’ve spent my entire professional career working in
libraries, Although like most librarians my pathway to this career was very
serendipitous and not at all intentional. I’ve worked primarily in academic
libraries and have actually worked in six different states in the western
United States, spanning all the way from Texas to Alaska. I currently work at
the MSU library which is at the Montana State University in Bozeman, and our
campus is the fastest growing campus in the state of Montana. We’re a
land-grant institution. We’ve got about 16,000 students but we just have one
physical library and we are a very, very busy place.

Well, that’s a great question. For me, it wasn’t so much
what our library is experiencing that brought me to design thinking but more
about how I came to the topic of design thinking. I was actually transitioning
back into the academic library world. I had had about an eight and a half-year
hiatus where I was working for a state library. During my acculturation back
into the world of academia I was attending two conferences in Austin, Texas and
one of them really opened my eyes to this topic. That conference was in its
first year. It was called Designing for Digital or D4D. That’s where I first
heard about a concept called service design, which is one of the many families
of the design menu.

Service design is holistic and co-creative and a very
user-centered approach to understanding customer behavior for creating or
refining services. After I attended this conference and then as I was learning
about the new library that I was working at, I was then able to observe the
processes and the traditions in the library and the way people approached
problem-solving and was able to then apply this concept to how I approached my
work as a new department head.

To think about design thinking you need to think just one
step broader about the concept of design in general. If you think of design as
this definition – any activity that translates an idea into a blueprint for
something useful, then design thinking is the process that will get you there.

This was pretty much started by a company you may have heard
of called IDEO, where they have defined design thinking as the process for
creative problem-solving. It’s a very human-centered approach to innovation.
How it works is that you take elements from a Designer’s Toolkit, which
includes really important concepts, the concepts of empathy and
experimentation. Through that process, you arrive at more innovative solutions.
In general this, in a nutshell, we could describe it, it’s like a three-step
process that includes the three I’s which are called Inspiration, Ideation, and
Iteration. I could go on and on and tell you lots more about this. There is a
lot of information out there especially if you go to the IDEO website that’s
going to walk you through how design thinking works. Do you want me to go on in
more detail?

Ok, I’ll start at the broad level. You may be familiar with
some of the hundreds of techniques that actually make up the design menu. Many
things are very common. We hear about mind-mapping a lot in libraries but
there’s things called storyboarding, there’s a technique called the Five Whys,
there’s road-mapping, role-playing, journey-mapping. It’s not easy to
encapsulate into one soundbite about what design thinking is. IDEO even talks
about how hard it is sometimes to describe the work that they do.

There’s a really popular video that you can find now
probably on YouTube. In 1999, the television company ABC, in their program
called Nightline did a really important story following IDEO through the
process of design thinking and that video is used over and over in classrooms
today that teach people about the process of design thinking.

In our profession we’re really lucky because IDEO paired up
with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They actually created a design
thinking toolkit for libraries. It’s actually freely available for anyone to
download. You can just go to Design Thinking for Libraries. You can Google it,
it’s designthinkingforlibraries.com. It actually walks you through step-by-step
how you can implement the design thinking process.

In our library we’re still in, I would describe it as, the
formative stages of becoming really knowledgeable about design and design
thinking. We have a core group of about five design-thinking enthusiasts in our
library. That group comprises librarians who at our institution are faculty and
staff members. We’ve applied numerous techniques in quite a few ways in our
library and we’re still in the midst of using some of the techniques right now.
But, I really do want to clarify that we’re still honing our own techniques. We
are librarians first and foremost. We’re not professional designers but we’re
getting better and better each time we test out a new technique.

Some of the recent techniques that we’ve tested out – one
recent project we collaborated with the Boston Public Library to improve the
printing process at our respective libraries. To do that we use a technique
called journey-mapping. We followed four patrons through the process of getting
something printed out in each of our libraries. Through that process, we were
able to see and hear about the process through the eyes and voices of real
users, which helps to concretely identify what we’re doing well, but really,
more importantly, the actual pain points the users were experiencing. It was
the pain points that we focused on to improve each of our processes at our
libraries.

Another one that we’ve experimented with is called service
blueprinting. In our library, we use that to better outline the process for providing
a service that we have in our library called specialty printing. Specialty
printing is when we print out large format items such as posters or we make
copies of the topo maps that are in our collection. Service blueprinting is a
design technique. It’s actually more of an operational tool that you use after
you’ve used some of the other design tools to gain evidence from the users, when
you’re ready to make a change to an existing service or a project or if you
want to create a new service or a project. The service blueprint comes a little
bit later in the process after you’ve gathered some of that user evidence.

The last one I’m going to mention is a really fun technique
we’ve experimented with and it’s super easy. It’s called the Love
letter/Breakup Letter Activity. This technique is a way to explore a particular
user’s relationship with an object or a service through what’s called
personification. What you do is you ask your user to consider their
relationship with something that you have in your organization an object or a
service. Consider it on the same level as a romantic relationship like with a
significant other. Then what you do is ask them to write a letter to that
service. You ask them to either write a love letter or a breakup letter.

We did that in our library and we called this campaign, ‘Hey,
MSU Library…We Need to Talk.’ We’ve done it twice around Valentine’s Day. We
posted stations throughout the library. Instead of just having your generic
feedback stations, that a lot of libraries have saying, Give Us Feedback on This Form, we posted stations that had these
printed out templates for letters. On one side was where the patron could write
their letter to us. Then on the backside, we also had a template for a coloring
station. So, we put out crayons and allowed the patrons to color some hearts
that we had put on the template. That was a really great way of just getting
some quick and very emotional feedback from our students.

Yes, exactly. You don’t get a lot of feedback that’s in the
in-between range. Either people are really emotional on one end or the other.
They really love the library and they tell you why or if they’re having a
specific pain point, they also tell you that.

That’s a great observation. The end goal is to improve the
user experience. Our results from the various forays that we’ve done into these
processes have varied. I’ll be honest with you, we’ve had many successes but we
haven’t always been 100% successful. I think that’s a really important takeaway
for anybody who’s learning about design and design techniques is that nothing
exists in a bubble, and as much as you try and implement these techniques that
we’re talking about in the best way possible, many times there are external
forces that can interfere with the end product. So, the decision-making process
might not go how you would like it.

But, having said that and to get super specific – we’ve had
many successes. The first example where I mentioned the project with the
Bozeman Public Library and the printing process – we learned that we had
overlooked about clearly communicating how the printing process works on our
website. One of our journeyers explained that her approach when she goes to any
new organization, be it a library, or a business or a store was she liked to
look up information about that place online and specifically, to look up how to
do whatever it was she wanted to do. Her pain point, we later learned, was that
our library did not clearly explain how our community users could print in the
library and how much it would cost them. Community is allowed to use our
library because, like I said we’re a land-grant institution and, it was just one
thing we had overlooked. Without going through that journey-mapping process we
wouldn’t have learned that.

Another project that we did that I actually didn’t mention
earlier, was with our core group of people, our design enthusiasts in the
library. Last semester we organized what was called a sandbox series. Through the sandbox
series, we asked library employees to join us for one-hour sessions where we
experimented and practiced with various design techniques. It’s a sandbox, so
the idea was that it was informal and we would just take a technique, learn a
little bit about it and do some practicing.

One of the sessions we had was focused on the service blueprint.
After that session, this technique was taken back to another group in our
library that was actually struggling with implementing a new service. The end
result was that the people in this group became absolute enthusiasts for the
service blueprinting technique. That was a super positive eye-opener for our
group, and we felt a real step forward to advance our ideas about design
throughout the whole library.

It sounds very responsive and a great way to get to what people
are experiencing. We all create these services with the best intentions but
until people get into the process we don’t see all the ins and outs of the way
it might work in everyday life, so very useful.

Some great resources – the one I mentioned earlier was the
collaboration between the company called IDEO and the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation – The Design Thinking Toolkit for libraries, which again is a free
resource that you can find on the internet. This is a really popular topic
right now so I can’t find myself reading the New York Times or some popular
periodical without finding articles on design thinking. It’s pretty hot right
now in business and industry.

So, if you were to just go to some popular publications like
the Harvard Business Review you can find a lot about how design thinking is
being more incorporated into the ethos of organizational culture. There are
many books out there on design thinking that are very popular. There’s a couple
of library practitioners that I’ll mention who are favorites of mine, Joe
Marquez and Annie Downey from Reed College. They’ve actually written a book
about service design for libraries that I can highly recommend as an expert
starting point.

If I may, I have two things I could mention here that are
inspirational to me but I’ll be really honest with you, I don’t tend to read a
lot of books about leadership, particularly like library leadership. But, I
find myself drawn to other sources of inspiration. One book that you may be
familiar with but that I have found myself drawn to in the past five or so
years is by Seth Godin and it’s called Tribes:
We Need You to Lead Us. The thing I like about this book is, like all of
Godin’s books, they are super easy to read. And, the premise is very simple.
The premise is that tribes are groups of people connected to each other, to a
leader and to an idea.

What he really does in this book is emphasize that almost
everyone can be a leader. But, most of us are kept from realizing our potential
by fear of criticism or fear of being wrong. Then if you’re drawn to being a
leader but you ignore that opportunity to lead you risk turning into what he
calls a ‘sheepwalker,’ which is someone who fights to protect the status quo at
all costs. I think that is what aligns with my thinking about design thinking
is that if you’re a design thinker you’re definitely not going to become a
sheepwalker.

And then, another recent source of inspiration from me isn’t
necessarily a book, but it’s a person. I’ve attended several presentations
given by a designer named, Jon Kolko his last name is spelled K O L K O. He
actually has several writings out there that are super inspirational. He’s
written some books and actually I mentioned Harvard Business Review earlier, he
has some really good pieces in the Harvard Business Review, most recently one
called, Design Thinking Comes of Age.
This is a really good piece because in it he advocates a set of principles
collectively known as design thinking which are empathy with users, a
discipline of prototyping, and a tolerance for failure is the best tool we have
for creating the kinds of interactions our users need. And, that in turn, we
can apply the design thinking to help develop a responsive and flexible
organizational culture.

That’s what really resonated with me was that his focus on
corporations as needing responsive flexible organizational cultures and how
design thinking could help with that. I really wanted to make that connection
to the work we do in libraries, as well.

Definitely, thank you. I really appreciate you sharing these
resources and giving us ideas for how to improve our services. As we close
today, do you want to share any thoughts on what being a librarian means to
you?

Absolutely. For me being in the field of librarianship means
that I get to learn something new every day. I literally learn something new
every day. This is what initially drew me to the profession, the idea of
helping people with their research on really interesting topics, topics which I
then got to learn about in the process. That is what keeps me in the profession
today over 20 years later. That’s what also allows me to explore these new
topics like ways of thinking, such as design thinking concepts.

So, through the process of helping users with their research
I gained such great satisfaction because I was part of a caring and helpful
profession. I was allowed to work with like-minded individuals. I love the idea
that the library is the great equalizer for a democratic society. So, yeah with
everything going on in our society I’m super thankful to be part of this
profession. For me, in all my years of experience, the field of librarianship
has just been a super positive experience.

Kris, thank you for joining us today from Montana. Design
thinking is a powerful way for those of us in libraries to respond to the
fast-paced changes happening in our information world today. It gets to the
heart of what our patrons are thinking and helps us create solutions. Thanks
for joining us.

Why We Burned Our First Leadership Book, or How to Develop a Leadership Path that Holds Personal Meaning

Presenter: Adriane Herrick Jaurez

Co-Presenter : Becca Lael – Park City Library

Utah Library Association Conference

Thursday, May 16, 1:30-2:20pm

Mountain America Expo Center

How can we develop a leadership path that holds personal meaning? Inspired by interviews from the Library Leadership Podcast, a variety of strategic insights will show us how everyone can improve their leadership to personally shape their workplace, the community they serve, and the trajectory of the library profession. Attendees will learn how one library manager’s leadership path was transformed to include personal meaning, resulting in braver development.

Commencement Speaker for the Graduation of the Utah State Regional Master of Library Science ProgramFriday, January 5, 7:00pm Viridian Event Center I will be giving a commencement speech for the graduating class of Cohort 12.

Utah State History Conference
October 10th– 11th, 2017 Rio Grande Depot, 300 S. Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, UT Honoring the Past, Moving Into the Future: The Renovation of the Historic Park City Library that Developed a Dynamic 21st Century Library while Achieving National Historic Register Designation.

Nevada/Mountain Plains Library Association Joint ConferenceOctober 16th – 18th, 2017 Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, 50 US-50, Stateline, NV89449
Lightning-round presentation on how The Park City Library recently underwent a $9.6M library renovation that included the creation of a media lab that included a sound booth, green screen, film equipment, and other high tech amenities to foster independent media production in a ‘film-centric’ mountain town that is accessible to everyone, not just movie producers.